Tuesday 30 April 2013

"Huge families on benefits are no myth... oh, hang on..."

From The Daily Mail

CLAIM: Only a tiny number of jobless families have large numbers of children reliant on the State for support.

REALITY: There are 160 families on out-of-work benefits with ten or more children. This figure was cited by the Left during the debate over the case of Mick Philpott from Derby, who killed six of his 17 children in a house fire and whose lifestyle was subsidised by taxpayers.

However, closer scrutiny of official figures shows that there are huge numbers of large workless households reliant on welfare.

There are 194,000 homes with three children; 76,310 with four; 25,980 with five; 8,760 with six; 3,200 with seven; 1,080 with eight; and 360 with nine.

Some 419,370 workless families have two children — which is the average number of offspring for all homes in the UK.


Yes, this is all very naughty of them, and if it were up to me I'd roll Child Tax Credits (awful, awful, awful) into a more generous Child Benefit (non-means tested, non-conditional, non-taxable) but pay that only for the first three children which a woman has (but not pay any for fourth and subsequent children) as a quick and simple way of eliminating the "mothers-versus-everybody else pay gap".

But let's look at the bigger picture:

In April to June 2012 there were 3.7 million UK households with at least one member aged 16 to 64 where no-one was currently working. This represented 17.9 per cent of households and was a fall of 0.8 percentage points, or 153,000 households, on a year earlier, the second consecutive fall. In all, 1.8 million children lived in these households, as did 5.0 million people aged 16-64.

So on average, there are 0.36 children for each workless adult.

How does this compare to the population as a whole?

In England & Wales there are 10.5 million children aged 0 to 15 and 36 million people aged 16 to 64. Add on 11% for whole of UK and knock off the ones from workless households and we end up with 35 million 'working' adults and 9.9 million children, which means 0.3 children per 'working' adult.

So yes, it would appear that workless adults do have slightly more children than their working counterparts. If they had children at the same rate, they would have 1.5 million children instead of 1.8 million. Only half of those are "extra" children (fourth and subsequent children), or put it this way, out of those 3.7 million workless households, only 116,000 have more than three children.

Let's assume that they receive about £60 a week for each child (CTC and CB) that means the total amount redistributed from working adults to non-working adults to pay for these extra children is a shade under £1 billion, i.e. 0.5% of the total welfare budget, and if you capped CTC and CB at three children, the "saving" would only be half that.

Big deal, is all I can say. By all means "do something" about this out of principle (there are social costs to take into account as well, but those are difficult to quantify), but don't pretend it's a cost-saving measure.

8 comments:

Woodsy42 said...

"There are 160 families on out-of-work benefits with ten or more children."
I find this very difficult to believe. It's less than one per town.
For a truer picture how about looking at the number of large families that require benefits because, even if someone works, they could not have afforded those children without benefits?

Macheath said...

The figures you give presumably only cover the number of dependent children under 18 living at home at any given time; those who have grown up and left must effectively disappear from the statistics before the youngest are born

Given an early start and 30 or more years of childbearing, is it possible that the total number of children a mother has raised on benefits will never be taken into account?

Bayard said...

W42, just cast your mind back to the C19th, when there were no benefits outside the workhouse. Did people have smaller or larger numbers of children then?
Alternatively, look at rich families, do they tend to have larger or smaller numbers of children?
AFAICS, having a large number of children is nothing to do with affordibility: it is due to not caring about the consequences of unprotected sex, lack of birth control, or, in a few cases, religious conviction.

Mark Wadsworth said...

W42, see my next post.

McH: "Given an early start and 30 or more years of childbearing, is it possible that the total number of children a mother has raised on benefits will never be taken into account?"

Yes of course, on average each adult has about 1 child, not 0.3 or 0.36. So there are probably slightly more adults who had unemployed parents than ones who had employed parents.

If you can be bothered to make some assumptions and calculation, feel free to do so, but i fail to see the relevance. We're not paying Child Benefit for the ones who have grown up.

B, good riposte to W42 but you are overlooking that a lot of people like having kids. They're hours of fun.

Bayard said...

Mark do people really have lots of kids, like six or seven, because they like having kids? I suppose that there must be some that do, but is it a statistical significant number?

Anyhow, all this is bollox anyway. It must cost the state less to have one workless family with ten children and four with none than five families with two or ten families with one, because of the economies of scale.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, OT1H, kids are a joy and delight. OTOH, kids are also a complete terror and waste of your precious time and money.

With most couples, these two forces balance out and they have one, two or three kids.

With some, the latter force gets the upper hand and they have no kids. With some people, the former force gets the upper hand and they have four or five or some such silly number.

And one woman in a million is addicted to having babies, there was a TV series about it recently, they'll have one baby every year until they hit menopause.

None of this is in any way statistically significant or relevant to anything in particular.

L fairfax said...

Do you think a family of 7 children is not a huge family?

Anonymous said...

LF, my words were: "With some people, the former force gets the upper hand and they have four or five or some such silly number."

So you can take it as read that I (personally) think that anything more than three is "huge" and certainly seven.

But there are only 3,200 families with 7 kids on benefits, that is a statistical blip and nothing of wider concern.